Rear Axle

dbm

dbm

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Howdie,
I was chatting to a mate of mine who is a big car nut and very mechanically minded. He said that he had had a look under the back suspension of a new A3 and in his opinion (based on that quick look) it still had the old rear suspension from the original A3 rather than the multi-link suspension like the Mk5 Golf.

Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Cheers
Dan
 
According to audi.co.uk, both the new A3 and the A3 Sportback have 4-link rear suspension. Is that the same as the MKV Golf? I'm not sure off the top of my head, but I would have thought so.
 
I'm not a guru on suspension design, but if there is a beam connecting the rear suspention arms, then it is has the torsion beam suspension like the previous modle and therefore unlikely to be a multi link suspension. Only the Quattro's have multilink rear suspension.
 
audi upgrades
According to an article in Autocar in March 2003 when the new A3 was first released...

"Development of the new chassis was led by VW. Envious of the Ford Focus's dynamic advances, the engineers set about devising a new four-link rear suspension as a substitute for the planned torsion beam. Designed, like the Focus, for maximum lateral stiffness with plenty of longitudinal compliance, the new rear axle, with seperate coil springs and dampers, is mounted on a subframe to further improve refinement. Apparently all new Golf-based models will benefit from the new rear end."
 
Ok, now neither the A3 (8P) nor the Golf (Mk5) have solid rear axles anymore: both have the exact same 4-Link rear suspension. Even the part numbers are the same.

The Quattro A3 shares the same suspension arms and location geometry, but obviously the wheel carriers and subframe are specific, to accomodate the axles and rear differential. The new .:R32 will undoubtedly use the same wheel carriers and subframe as the Quattro A3 8P.

Hope this helps (and thanks David!)
 
With pleasure. I only wish there were a way to post the images I have from etka... If anyone knows how to do this, I'd love a pm. Thanks!
 
Hi JaminBen

I have copied the ETKA illustrations of the rear axle of the Golf 5 and the A3 up to my homepage and these are links to them.

link to A3 rear axle
link to Golf 5 rear axle

If you have an internet homepage it's quite easy. Go into ETKA and select the page. Press Print Screen to save the page to the clipboard. Load Paint, paste the image into Paint, save the file as a JPG file. Then just copy that JPG file to your homepage and create a link. Make sure you use the same case for the JPG in the link otherwise it dones not like it.

Not sure how to do it without a homepage to link to. Perhaps so other knowledgeable member could help on that one.
 
Great stuff, David! Thank you very much ;-)

The first link is to the A3 Quattro rear axle. Notice how, despite the subframe and wheel carriers being different to a fwd (either A3 or Gti), all the suspension arms seem to be identical.
 
Hmmm, when I go to print screen it automatically tries to select one of the printers... I can't get ETKA to send the info into a file on my hard drive.
 
Sorry, I seem to have copies up the wrong ETKA screen. This is the one for the front wheel drive A3 rather that the quattro version.

A3 rear axle - front wheel drive

The normal Windows reaction, when the Print Screen key is pressed, is to send the screen to the clipboard. I personally have a program called ClipMate 5 running which allows me to capture multiple clipboard entries, but that should not make any difference.

You could try using Alt - Print Screen which should just send the current window to the clipboard rather than the whole screen.
 
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